Sunday, August 3, 2014

Thomas Hobbes and the Twisted Genius of Open Carry

Open Carry is a stalking horse for a kind of DIY Governance whose goal is to systematically erode and ultimately destroy public trust in government — to return America to what the conservative movement imagines is its “pure,” pre-federal government state of nature

When the Founders looked for inspiration for the Declaration of
Independence, they found it in the works of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes,
and the Baron de Montesquieu — the so-called “Social Contract”
theorists. These men argued that humans existed in a State of Nature
where every man was his own judge and jury and where, therefore, little
good was ever accomplished. It was stable government — or, as they
called it, “Commonwealth” — that provided the basis for economic,
political, or social progress.

What the gun nuts and Second Amendment absolutists are determined to
do, in alliance with the Tenth Amendment fetishists, is to fundamentally
undermine America’s social contract and the government upon which it
depends – devolution to Hobbes’ description of life without government, a “war of all against all:”

…a time or war where every
man is enemy to every man…wherein men live without other security than
what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them
withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the
fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no
navigation nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no
commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things
as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account
of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Which is just the way the Gun Lobby likes it. Because nothing pumps
up gun sales like continual fear and danger of violent death.